


Excess

by elle_stone



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Love, M/M, MWPP Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-02
Updated: 2012-05-02
Packaged: 2017-11-04 17:57:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/396603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a blank spot in his memory and no one in his bed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Excess

**Author's Note:**

> Written in October 2007 for prompt number 6 at the barefootboys community on livejournal. Warnings for language and allusions to violence.
> 
> "When love is in excess, it brings a man neither honor nor worthiness." -Euripedes

Remus Lupin knows how to keep a secret. He has kept, in his short life, so many; he has found hiding places for them that most people never even realize they have. He stores them away behind his ears, beneath his fingernails, in the hollow of his collarbone. He takes them out when he is alone and examines them, sees how they have grown old and pale, with no one to know them but him, crumbling and stiff, disused knowledge.

 

In the early morning hours of dawn, he lies on a blanket under the stands near the Quidditch pitch. Sirius searches out secrets, hands coursing over pale stretches of skin, rough hands, dark hands. If Remus looks out far enough, he can just see the sun rising in splashing pinks and yellows over the horizon. Sirius isn’t looking for the sun. He is not yet ready to give up the darkness of their night.

 

Sirius knows. Sirius knows some, if not all, of Remus’s secrets, and he has given him secrets of his own to share between them. They are so close that sometimes Remus isn’t sure where one begins, the other ends. He is so tangled up that sometimes he cannot even breathe.

 

The next day, he comes to class with leaves in his hair, and James laughs behind his hand and Peter tells him, anxious voice low, um, Moony, mate, you have—something—right there

 

He is a bit embarrassed but no one would believe the truth, Remus Lupin and Sirius Black, Remus Lupin and anyone, rolling through leaves like little boys again, but sixteen and seventeen, and their bodies too close for friendship and their lips so many times meeting, Remus memorizing slowly the inside curves of Sirius’s mouth.

 

His thoughts wander often now.

 

One day he is standing at the sink, the boys bathroom on the third floor, the one with the cracked mirror that hasn’t yet been magicked clean or otherwise replaced, and looking at the way the two sides of his face split and overlap and double and separate, the widened gap between his gray wolf eyes, and somehow, his secret slips. Perhaps from behind his ear, perhaps scrubbed out from his fingernails. There is the sound of a flushing toilet, behind him, from a stall he thought was empty and which startles him. And Nott appears. He has transformed over the summer, muscles instead of fat, taller than Remus now by a full head. Not unattractive, but for his smirk and the cracking sounds of his knuckles wherever he goes. He washes his hands and Remus doesn’t look at him. Just keeps on washing and washing and washing his own hands.

 

“I know who you are,” Nott says.

 

He has come to stand behind Remus now, the two disjointed sides of his face reflected in the glass.

 

I know you.

 

Werewolf.

 

WEREWOLF.

 

Killer.

 

Evil.

 

At night Remus dreams of torches and angry crowds, hunters in the woods, hands around his throat with his back against a cool slime wall. Sometimes even during the day, he worries he will lose himself to these dark fantasies.

 

And now, Nott. Cracking his knuckles. I know you. I know who you are.

 

“Excuse me?” Remus says.

 

Nott steps forward and puts his hands on Remus’s shoulders and whispers in his ear, “Faggot.”

 

Remus feels his knees go weak. He wants to faint. He does not answer.

 

Nott walks away, then; he does not do anything; but Remus knows now that his secret is gone from him, lost and it could be anywhere. He thinks he finds it in the eyes of everyone he meets.

 

At night, Sirius climbs into his bed and pulls the curtains tight around them. He takes Remus’s hands and kisses up them, from the tips of the fingernails, to the wrist and higher. I love you so much it hurts.

 

Remus kisses down Sirius’s neck, careful not to use his teeth. He closes his eyes and breathes in Sirius’s scent, his soap and the stale cigarette smoke from his new habit. He hasn’t told Remus yet, but there is nothing about Sirius that Remus doesn’t know. He closes his eyes and breathes in. I love you so much it burns.

 

Sirius’s grip is so harsh on Remus’s skin that he leaves bruises. Remus counts them as the opposite of battle scars, the opposite of moon scars. 

 

He cannot leave any on Sirius. He is too afraid, afraid of his own strength, of his own power, afraid of causing pain.

 

Sirius is always trying to pull them closer, closer.

 

I love you so much—so much—I can’t stand it—Moony

 

Padfoot

 

Fuck

 

I love you

 

In the morning he wakes up and for a minute, he cannot breathe. There is a blank spot in his memory, and no one in his bed.

 

Sirius is smoking his second to last cigarette, leaning against the wall, in the cool and overwhelming shadow of the castle. It looms above him in limitless gray. Remus finds him without effort. It seems, to him, as he approaches, that Sirius’s clothes aren’t fitting quite right today; they are too wrinkled; they sit to the side of where they should. And all of a sudden his own clothes feel wrong, too small and too big at the same time.

 

He comes to lean next to Sirius. They adopt the same position. Sirius offers him a smoke. He doesn’t, usually, but the smell of it on Sirius’s skin has flooded him with addiction, and he accepts. For five minutes, ten, they are silent.

 

“Sirius,” he says, finally. “What did I tell you last night?”

 

Sirius shrugs. He knows, but the secret is hidden on his person, and he’s not about to bring it out to this light.

 

“I mean it, Sirius, tell me—”

 

“You know.”

 

He does, but it makes his stomach sink and a raw bile rise up in its place. He is sick into the bushes before he even hears the news, announced through slivers of whispered gossip, a quick rush down the halls and into the dormitories. Nott is in the infirmary, people are saying. He was—was attacked. It’s bad, they say. It’s bad. And no one knows who did it, and he’s not talking.

 

“Remus,” someone says, above him. For a minute, he doesn’t recognize the voice. He knows the touch though, careful and rough against the back of his neck. “Remus, come on. It will be okay,” Sirius is saying. “I thought—you wanted—just don’t be upset. Come on. Come upstairs. Come with me.” 

 

Remus doesn’t know what to do so he follows where the strong touch leads him.


End file.
